Because Google loves you, and wants you to know that somethings really are free with no strings attached (*cough), this Holiday travel season you will be able to enjoy free WiFi at one of 47 participating airports. Additionally, through the holiday season (’til January 15, 2010) All Virgin flights will have free WiFi.

Tearing up at the generosity of Google? Well let them flow because Google is also making it possible for users enjoying free wifi to give back:

“travelers will have the option make a donation to Engineers Without Borders, the One Economy Corporation or the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. Google will match the donations made across all the networks up to $250,000, and the airport network that generates the highest amount per passenger by January 1, 2010 will receive $15,000 to donate to the local nonprofit of their choice.”

For a list of all 47 participating airports (I checked, and Buffalo International Airport is on the list… WEEE) go to www.freeholidaywifi.com. The free gift starts Monday, November 15th.

Click through the jump to read the press release.

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I’ve only managed to get one other person to “surf” with me on the Google Wave Preview. Its not that I don’t have a lot of friends, just none of my friends have invites. Therefore, I haven’t had a whole lot of chances to really interact, but I can definitely see where it’s going to be a pretty major tool in 2010. That is… if Wave launches in 2010. Robert Scoble booed the launch, calling it overhyped… I just think he’s a fat old overhyped complainer with too many friends and not enough who actually like him. Wave is extremely complex, and the possibilities are nearly endless for what it can achieve when complete.  For now, we just sit and tinker, patiently, hoping for more friends to play with…

And if you are reading this and still have no idea what Google Wave is, watch this most excellent of concise explanations below. And no, I don’t have any more invites. (via Gizmodo)

The second thing I woke up to, besides my Google Wave invite, was a pop up on my phone that said there was a new update available for Android. I was still groggy and more excited about Wave, so I clicked “update” and hopped in the shower.

Showered, caffeinated, and at work waitng for people to add me on Wave, I finally sat down and looked at all the new things in the DRC83, which I take to be Donut Release Candidate 83, AKA the first update to Android 1.6.

Donut adds all the features they said it would: updated quick search box, multiple screen-size support, CDMA support, text-to-speech API, and a totally refreshed Android Market.

Updating the phone was quick, but the initial reboot took about 2 minutes for me. A few widgets crashed (calendar, unread SMS count), I was prompted to turn on Location sharing for Google, and the G1 went a little wonky. After a few more minutes, everything seemed to run fine. Overall speed seems to have improved, and the new Power Control widget is nice, letting me turn on/off wifi,bluetooth,GPS, sync, and brightness right from the home screen.

Android 1.6 also fixes a little pet peeve of mine. Previously, when you updated an app, the Market only told you what version you were upgrading to. Now it also tells you what version you are upgrading from. Trivial information for some, but for people who keep track of revisions and changelogs, this will be much loved.

I wasn’t expecting the upgrade so soon, but TMoNews  sheds a little light on the subject:

Select G1 handsets at 12AM Eastern Daylight Time tonight will receive the Donut update. Next, after a 24-hour waiting period, T-Mobile will extend its deliciousness to MyTouch3G handsets–that is, if there are no hiccups (meaning no bricked phones). Then, if all goes well, the rest of the users will start seeing the trickle down effect, regardless of handset.

Has anyone else gotten the update?

I consider myself a loyal follower of The Google, so it was an expected surprise to wake up to my Google Wave Preview invitation. I’m still waiting on being able to test Wave locally on buffawhat.com… I’m sure those invites will roll out in time. If you don’t know what Google Wave is, its essentially an open source communication and collaboration tool that I believe will change EVERYTHING. Check out this introduction below, explains it a lot better than I can.

I have a few invitations available for the preview, like 4 left. Comment on this post and I’ll send them as they come. and if I get more, I’ll go down the list. You don’t have to put your email in the actual comment itself, I’ll pull it from the form in the backend. I would suggest giving me your gmail/google acct as you’d probably have a better experience that way. Get ready to “surf” ya’ll!! (I really really want that to be the new term for Google Waving… help me spread it)

And if you already have a Google Wave Preview account, add me to your contacts if you’d like. The email I’m using is buffawhat [at] gmail.com

Update:: Just so you know, Google has this to say about the invitations:

Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.

Essentially, that means you may have to wait a bit for an invite to drop in your box.

Today is the day that Google will let loose 100,000 invites to the new and hardly finished communication service that is going to change the world: Google Wave. Like me, everyone is clamoring and refreshing their inbox to see if they get an invite. as of writing this post, it is a quarter to 4pm…

But, in Sydney AU, its only a quarter to 6am. Why does that matter? Well, the Google Wave team is based in Sydney and they just aren’t awake yet. Stephanie Hannon, project manager for Wave says that the invites will be out later in the day for us Stateside folk…

via mashable

How do you know if you’ll get an invite? You don’t. But if you signed up for the waiting list a while back, or use Google Apps, you might have a good chance.

Day two of the Google I/O developer conference unveiled a potential game changer for how we use the web to communicate and socialize. It’s called Google Wave, and it’s an open-source collaboration tool meant to replace our normal methods of sending emails, replying to threads and forums, and sharing information like photos, documents, videos and other media. Day 2 of Google I/O was all about Wave, and right now its a very much unfinished developer preview, but should be ready to launch to the public by the end of the year.

Wave was created by the same team who brought you Google Maps, and they hope that the same amount of developer involvement and community that built up around Maps will follow into Wave. I dare say that the API for Wave is nearly double that of Maps, and the extensibility is tenfold. Wave is your homepage, your main portal. Email has become too multipurpose and its use has become cluttered. Communicating with all your friends via Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc, is hard. Sharing photos and videos, collaborating on documents, all of that is fragmented across the web and across dozens of unique userbases. Wave collides all of that into one place, while instantly (and I do mean instantly) routing and pushing all of your socialness to where you want it to go and to whoever you want to see it. Its really an intense new way of thinking, and I urge you to watch the Keynote for Wave that I’ve embedded below. The video is 90 minutes long but absolutely worth every minute.

Right now Google Wave is in a developers sandbox (launch to the public by the end of 2009), and I/O attendees were given early access to test and develop gadgets and extensions for the system. If the launch is timed and publicized correctly, I can see this becoming a major part of life on the web. I’m already sold, and I can see it integrating and replacing at least 40% of my daily social life on the web. And it works with Twitter. Enough said.

wave.google.com

googlewavedev.blogspot.com

Oh me of little faith. And here I was thinking the goodness wouldn’t come to the G1 till Summer of 2009…

The core Android development team just announced a roadmap for  a special branch of code, called “cupcake” that will be merging into the main branch in January 2009, giving much needed fixes and features to G1 users.

via the roadmap - During Android’s transition to an open-source project, some development has continued to happen in a private branch.  We are working to move the rest of these changes into the open as soon as possible, and all future open-source work will happen in the public git repositories.  All changes that have already been submitted to the public repositories will be merged into the newer code base, so nothing should be lost.

Click though the jump to read about some of the features and improvements that cupcake has for the G1.

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My Maps Editor is a recent free addition to the Android Market, the result of 20% time from Brian Cornell, a software engineer at Google. The app allows full viewing and editing of the My Maps section of Google Maps, with a few bonuses like GPS support and local caching. With My Maps (you can find this as a tab in google maps), you can add placemarks, shapes, and paths, upload photos, and insert HTML formatted content in the placemark description. You can then share your custom map, keep it private, or open it up to collaboration.

With this application you can create, edit, share, and view personalized maps on your Android powered phone synchronized with the My Maps tab on Google Maps. It supports full editing functionality for markers, lines, and shapes, plus the ability to mark your location using GPS or attach a photo directly from your phone.

Click through to read the rest of the review, and see lots of pretty screenshots.

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The folks over at ModMyGPhone claim that Lenovo has a phone in the works, with pictures to back it up. Dubbed “OPhone,” this is a sweet model and beautifully designed. No word on specs, but from the picture you can tell there is a spacious touchscreen with embedded “hard buttons,” USB port, and a headphone jack.

China Mobile has been working on OMS for quite some time now. With the Apple deal going nowhere after multiple rounds of negotiations (because of China Mobile’s refusal to share any of its profits), it needs an OS of it’s own. A well placed source said,”Given these(iPhone, Android, Symbian) developments, it is becoming very clear that developing a proprietary handset operating system is essential for dominance of the mobile Internet market in China. At the moment, China Mobile is in a comparatively weak position without its own operating system. With its own operating system, China Mobile will be able to commission customized phones from handset makers and keep its hand strong in negotiations over profit sharing. There is even the possibility that China Mobile may move into manufacturing handsets itself.”

The one catch, we will never see this in the US. even if Lenovo could possibly bring it over, it would be seasons past by that time and most of the internal parts would have to be replaced to work on a US carrier and spec regulation.

That being said, who will be the one to bring the Shiny Shiny, the beautiful phone with the killer features, to the US, finally giving android a cute body to go with all them brains?

Let’s face, the HTC G1 is nothing more than a glorious consumer-passable dev model. Google even admits it as they are now selling it as an sim-unlocked dev model for $399 to developers. I’m not saying the G1 is a bad phone; its a great phone spec-wise if we can forgive a few HTC blunders (more on that later). the G1 is a buttaface (yea i said it).

Right now, we have a few comanies saying they are making phones for the Android OS, but lets focus on the ones that can actually give the US some love.

• Motorola – yea.. ya know what? Uh-uh Sources say the Moto+droid will look like the Krave ZN4, and be cheaper and faster than the G1. As a multiple Motorola owner, I used to replace a RAZR every three months, and every other Motorola phone I’ve had has bit it somehow or another. They make great throwaway phones that shatter on impact; I want a smartphone to be a little more durable. Plus, I don’t think they’ll have enough life left in them to make more than one model.
• Samsung and LG – I do not like their phones. Any of them. Plus, they were in the race to get the first out but something happened and we probably wont see anything till midsummer next year. I would love to eat my words and be humbly surprised but I doubt it.
• Sony Erricsson – I am going to put my bets on a high-end Android phone from Sony Erricsson in the Summer of 2009. A recent addition to the fold of the OHA, Erricsson has experience making a great high power phone, with robust media features, and powerful cameras. One of the biggest gripes about the G1 is lack of pretty, no headphone jack, and a crappy camera. With all-star releases like the cybershot K800i and the new Xperia under the belt, Sony Erricsson is not going to pull any stops to make an Android phone with everything.
• HTC – They already have a G-Phone out, so I’ll give them the credit for actually being able to create, market, and sell an Android based smartphone. The question here is can they do it again, this time with better hardware?  I’ve had a few HTC phones, and 3MP doesn’t mean shit if the shutter is slow. I can only manage to take great pictures on the G1 by holding the phone really still and hoping my subject doesn’t move. This is really rough for my attempts at getting hot bear du jours in the wild. I can forgive the lack of video recording; it’s an Android feature that isn’t available yet. And while HTC could put a 3mm headphone jack in their next G-phone, they probably won’t because they LOVE their ExtUSB ports and think you should too. HTC designs a pretty phone, and have done wonders in making Windows Mobile less of a giant turd, just by wrapping it in some shiny. The point is that HTC can do the shiny shiny for Android, but the G2 will be a shiny turd as well if the can’t boost their hardware.

It seems that the race is really between HTC and Sony Erricsson. Can HTC fix their issues and pop out a beaut instead of a turd? Or will Sony Erricsson lay down the mother of all iPhone/Nokia killers? Tune in this Summer.

What do you think? Who else is in contention? Does Motorola have a chance in hell? Let ‘em rip in the comments.

Seeing as Google owns pretty much everything else, why would it suprise us that they own thousands of domains?

Pingdom has done what they do best (ping of course!) and compiled a giant list of all the domains owned (or merely pointed) by Google.

Some of my favorites….

• gmailblows.com
• googleporn.com
• googlepoo.com
• googlemotherfucker.com
• mariolovespasta.com
• frooglesucks.com
• googleclusters.com
• bayareaburritos.com
• hostedbygoogle.com

Pingdom via Techcrunch